5 Essentials Fundamental to Ecommerce Startup Success

When you start an e-commerce business, you have ten thousand things to worry about from finding the right shipping vendor to a sustainable and robust hosting provider. These are, however, the basics of starting an e-commerce venture. In this article, we will talk about slightly less discussed essential tools and tactics that are crucial to your success.

1. Convert Out-of-Stock to Pre-orders

Nothing is more annoying than seeing the product you want out of stock. If you are a startup, it is quite natural to invest in a limited amount of stock until you can increase sales to cover a larger inventory.

A lot of website plugins and apps allow customers to pre-order and pay for an item even if it is out-of-stock. What’s more, you can add your note about shipping (e.g. Out of Stock Products usually take 2-3 weeks to ship), so they can decide if they want to go forward with the order or not.

2. Forget Live Chat, Get Facebook Chat

With Shopify introducing buy buttons for Twitter and Facebook, a new era of shopping has begun. However, e-commerce businesses are not stopping there. Another trend in e-commerce is to use social media chat messenger. This way the customer can have a more personalized and seamless shopping experience. What’s more, your business can have more fans and reviews on your social media page.

If you are not leveraging your Facebook account to turn it to a super-friendly and casual support channel, you are not making use of the latest technology. It even facilitates communication as all your conversations are stored in Facebook inbox, so you can follow up with a friendly hello or wish customers birthday wishes or send them specials to build a rapport with them. In the image below, see how Rosie’s Boutique uses the Facebook Chat app.

3. The Art of Cross-Selling and Up-Selling

When you have limited products, the art of cross-selling as popularized by Amazon might not seem like a good idea. However, whether you are selling 5 products or 50, you always have a chance to both cross-sell and up-sell. Amazon recommendation engines, take a backseat!

See how bitter root, a vintage-inspired boutique is cross-selling here with “you might also like” suggestions (shown in the image below). This is a classic example of selling related products that have a great chance of being picked up.

You can also integrate product management apps and plugins with your website, giving you an added advantage by allowing you to add extra features to your products such as gift-wrapping, custom logo, custom messages, matching accessories, etc., so you can up-sell your product.

If, however, you have picked a no-frills, simple e-commerce platform to build a free website which doesn’t integrate with product recommendation apps and add-ons, you need to think of an alternate way to intelligently up-sell.

One way to upsell your products is to strategically place your highest grossing, popular and budget friendly products in separate sections from top to bottom or left to right. Make sure your products are neatly categorized. Here’s an example.

4. SEO-Friendly Review Scores

We all know the importance of SEO for an e-commerce startup. One of the best ways to boost SEO is through product reviews as they encourage transparency and boost conversions. A lot of e-commerce companies are using SEO-friendly review scores to gain ranking in Google search results.

Many review management apps provide support for Google microdata, sometimes referred to as rich snippets or structured data. They automatically add the store’s total review score and display it in Google’s search results.

5. Referral & Loyalty Programs

A successful business is one that has repeat customers.

Last but not the least, successful e-commerce start-ups have a very effective referral and reward system. This is one of the best ways to spread the word about your business. You must have customizable rewards tools to incentivize customers to share your campaigns, discounts, offers and product pages as much as possible.

Here are some ideas for incentivizing:

Rewards on purchase over specified amount

Cashback on purchases on specific payment gateway platforms

Rewards on newsletter subscription

Rewards on referral

Rewards on social shares

Rewards on reviews

Rewards on social media interactions (quiz, contests, etc.)

Ready for Ecommerce Startup Success?

So what did we learn so far? With almost all platforms, builders including Magento, Shopify, etc. allow you to integrate with 3rd party apps. These app and plugin integrations are now easier than ever. For every e-commerce startup aiming for success, 5 essential strategies are:

Make pre-ordering easy

Leverage social media possibilities with chat (primarily Facebook)

Don’t miss cross-selling and up-selling opportunities

Post review scores on Google for transparency and SEO purposes

Devise good referral and loyalty programs

If you want to improve your chances of eCommerce startup success, make sure you follow these 5 tips and have all the above-mentioned tools in your e-commerce arsenal. They are indispensable for your success, so treat them as your number one weapons!

Avinash Nair

Avinash Nair is a Digital Marketer at E2M, one of India’s fastest growing SEO Agencies committed to meeting the highest ethical standards of digital marketing strategies and drive sustainable business growth. He is responsible for SEO and PPC services. You can find him on Twitter: @AviNair52

Just to add a note to your point 1. There are times where the notify me feature still useful as oppose to the Pre-Order because we can use the Notify me feature to judge the interest and decided if we should re-order the products. Sometimes, we don’t want to accept Pre-order as soon as it is sold out due to the minimum order quantity set by the supplier.

Yes, that is a good point. But how do you know if they will actually order when you notify them? I often use that feature, but I don’t always order immediately after I get notified. I sometimes do put the item in my shopping cart so it will be there the next time I come to buy.Gail Gardner would love you to read ..Business Intelligence: Your Key to Success in Stiff Competition

Yes, this is a valid concern. The notify me feature need to have a feature that able to track the purchase. Just embed a URL parameter to the link and when customer click on the link and landed back to your website, record it / place a cookie.

Base on the information, later when the customer checkout, you should be able to track if the customer purchasing due to the email campaign, and when the customer do purchase, do the customer also purchase other items as well? We are able to derived the direct revenue and indirect revenue from the notifications.

And yes, like what you have described, customer place the item to cart, and checkout some other times, we might lose track of it, but at least we still able to gather information like click through rates and cart recovery email might come in handy for your scenario.

Also, when the merchant re-order, never order 100% base on what is shown in the notify me report. Perhaps 70%. But this really depends on what the individual store is selling 🙂

I agree with the Facebook thing. Why keep your own chatbox on the website while literally every person on the planet is on Facebook now. If you create a good Facebook page it is very easy to chat with your customers and they will feel like they are in a comfortable environment.

Thanks for sharing the information about E Commerce business. Actually I am looking for Ecommerce startup and finally I found here. I really enjoyed your article, It contain a arious information which I was looking for.

E-commerce is one of the best platforms of business nowadays in my view. It’s the era of digitization and everybody wants a smart way of doing things in the best possible way.
Your tips are well appreciable. Thanks for it.

For that all you need a good marketer or what is better – a virtual assistant. VA can handle all routine and marketing work so that you will have more time for business strategy. Here are tasks that every entrepreneur can outsource http://vafromeurope.com/services/

Your experience have inspired me a lot which you have shared with us. As i tld u that your article help me a lot. In ma next comment i will told u everything clearly that how can ur blog help me, wht i had lernd frm ur blog. thnx for sharng such a nice ideas with us. keep posting helpful post like this.Frankly speaking I was looking for such kind of stuffs. Thanks for the post.

You don’t want just any traffic – you only want traffic from potential buyers in your country or at least those who can read Slovak. For this, you must be active there those people are. If there are social networks in your language or groups of people who read your language on particular social sites, you want to interact with them where they already are.

Unfortunately, most ecommerce sites will need to buy AdWords to get buyers. Be sure to sell at prices that allow you to afford that. You could also try ranking your pages to get organic traffic in your language. You do that by having lots of text on the page, always filling in the alt-image fields on your images, and getting the attntion of larger sites o they wil link to you.Gail Gardner would love you to read ..The Secrets of Growth – How WB21 Engineered a Huge Increase in Customer Acquisition

That was really some informational article, really helped me a lot to understand more about the world of e-commerce. You really have some great writing skills, thank you again for such an informational article hope to see more of your articles.Titan would love you to read ..Hero Pleasure Vs Yamaha Fascino Comparison

I really like to read this article , because it helps once in my online business development. Saya juga seorang pemula dalam bisnis eCommerce. [Translation: I am also a novice in ecommerce]. Many obstacles that I passed. After reading this article , the greater my passion to continue running this eCommerce business. Thanks for sharing…….
I will return to this website to find information and add my insights.Jam Tangan would love you to read ..Tips Cara Merawat Agar Jam Tangan Bisa Tahan Lama

Love the tip of turning out-of-stock items into pre-sales. Also, love the tip on putting the highest Grossing Products just above the Most Popular products, etc. Great Marketing Savvy there! And, of course, upselling and cross-selling is something we see every day when we shop, but it’s important for us website owners to remember to apply it to our own sites!

I’m a beginner in e-commerce and marketing and this article is really useful and great thank you for the pieces of information..Billy Scanlan would love you to read ..Libero – Simple, Elegant Magazine & Blog

Hi Avinash,
This is really great post, I am also going to start an eCommerce portal but finding many difficulties, Starting a shopping portal isn’t easy as I thought. But after reading your post I enough blueprints to get started.
Thanks for sharing.
Regards,
– EthanEthan Moore would love you to read ..Munitio PRO40 Review: High Performance Headphones, Gold

I am going to start new eCommerce site i have read your full post and when i was thinking to start my site i think it will be heard to get success but on your process its not so hard as i think. thanks for the informative things.Md.rasel would love you to read ..Clipping path and Uses

This is my first visit to your blog!! A month ago I started my E-commerce Site. But it’s really tough to rank because less content. But after reading your blog post I got idea to share thought’s to my client’s for best customer experience.

Even ecommerce sites must develop longer content. Those that only show products with very little text have great difficulty ranking. There is no reason (other than the time it takes) that an ecommerce site can’t write reviews or more comprehensive descriptions for their product pages. And don’t forget the category pages. Those need to have more text on them, too, if you ever hope to rank.Gail Gardner would love you to read ..IOT: eCommerce Retail Trends Revolution

Hey! Robin that’s really Cool, you’ve mentioned all the keys to power up a E-Commerce portal. And, converting Out-of-Stock products into Pre-Order is really better than Best. As it’ll help also help in maintaining and improving the reputation of any E-Commerce Company.Akshar Mohan would love you to read ..WordPress Plugins that Powers HowToCracker.com

This article really contains a new information for me , thank you for this explanation. I start a company and your steps are very important for me.Mariusz would love you to read ..Koniec sprawy Mariusza Kamińskiego

Hi Robin,
Yes you are right. Adding a review button always helps as most of the customers these days consult product or brand reviews before making any purchase decision. They trust reviews as much as personal recommendation. Moreover, for small e-commerce brands the biggest obstacle is building trust between themselves and their customers as people have become more cautious nowadays. So having genuine and positive reviews is essential as it will encourage the customers to view that brand as someone they can trust and someone who can provide exceptional customer service experience.

Hi Niyu,
It’s all about providing personalized shopping experience to your customers. With Facebook chat it becomes easier for customers to connect with the brand in real time. Live chats also increase the conversions and sales volumes and the best part about Facebook chat is that you can keep a track of all your conversations you have had with the company and have a full overview of interactions in one page.

This article really contains a new information for me , thank you for this explanation . You can say i’m beginner in e-commerce and marketing but i can make this article as a reference for me .hamada would love you to read ..Hazardous materials /awareness level

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